A Pound of Flesh
by seemethrough
Summary: It's not that Sakura can't heal all wounds; there are some wounds she chooses not to heal. (In which Kakashi screws up and he knows it.)


The first time Sakura sees Kakashi after Naruto's departure is two years later. He walks in with a massive cut cornering his brows, bleeding profusely on her floor. Kakashi doesn't notice her, her hair is capped from observing a surgery and she has yet to take off the surgical attire.

Sakura is too busy signing paperwork and prescribing medicine to notice her former teacher until she turns around to grab his chart. They recognize each other simultaneously.

"Sakura?" The Copy-Nin blinks, a gloved hand palming the cut to staunch the blood.

"Kakashi?" She glances down at the clipboard and then back to her infamous former teacher. The blood pools at the tip of his feet where he is standing. She frowns and waves to a chair, "You should sit before you fall."

Kakashi listens to her because his vision is beginning to spot and finds the chair like a blind person. It's the first time they've seen each other since the official disbandment of Team 7. Kakashi is well aware of the tension and silence growing between them. He is also aware that Sakura drops the attachment on his name.

Sakura, to her credit, snaps on some gloves and pulls away at the surgical cap, tossing it in a trash bin without even looking. She slides her chair over to him, lifting his hand away from the gash to inspect it and makes a face. "That's a nasty cut there." She comments and rolls her chair back to the counter.

Kakashi automatically moves his hand to cover the wound again but Sakura's hard voice cuts him like metal. "Don't touch it. Your glove is going to cause an infection." She soaks a cotton ball with alcohol and Kakashi makes a note that it's 100% rubbing alcohol.

She's not even close to gentle when she practically smacks the cotton against his forehead. He winces when she dabs it along his cut, strands of loose cotton catching against the broken skin.

"I heard you made Chuunin." He says softly, alcohol from the swab dripping down his eye. His eyes burn but he's not sure if it's from the alcohol or regret from seeing how much his former student has grown without him. Sakura presses a dry cotton pad against the corner of his eye to absorb the excess alcohol. "Congratulations."

Her fingers twitch before resuming, now carefully tracing the open skin. She's rough but meticulous and Kakashi can tell from the way she moves that Sakura is a full-fledged medic. "Is that all you heard?" She asks back vaguely.

He doesn't reply for awhile and Sakura doesn't think he will. She doesn't stop in her treatment, her fingers flaring green. "I'm only going to heal the first layer of the dermis to stop the blood coagulation and will stitch you up after. The body needs to remember to heal itself." She says cryptically.

Sakura is so proficient in healing, she does so without applying chakra anesthesia and heals the first layer with fluidity of a veteran medic. Kakashi is amazed for all of two seconds before she pulls out a needle and thread. She doesn't reach for the lidocaine behind her.

"Are you going to stitch me up now?" He wonders if she catches his double entendre. "Without the anesthetic?" He adds a little incredulous when he sees the needle making way dangerously close to his eye.

Sakura shoots him a look with a raised eyebrow and coolly replies, "We don't numb shinobi patients for flesh wound. Anesthesia is for our civilians." Then without warning, she loops the needle through his skin and stitches him up slowly. Painfully slow.

Kakashi takes it without a grimace this time.

She plasters a pink bandage of small hippos dancing across his brows, making the image of the copy-nin fall incredibly flat. "You shouldn't scar. The stitches are laced with chakra. They'll dissolve when the skin heals." She begins to pack everything away, capping needles and depositing it into the hazardous waste bucket. She instructs him methodically, like she recites to a thousand of her patients before him, "Try to keep sweat or water from touching the wound. Clean it with peroxide and come back in seven days for a post check up."

"Okay." He replies because he's listening intently to this girl he hasn't seen in two years becoming someone he doesn't recognize. And maybe for all the times he didn't listen to her.

Sakura wipes a sheet of gauze over the blood that has trickled down his face from the wound. It has started crusting and she wets the gauze with as little antiseptic to make cleaning easier.

Kakashi catches her hand, "You don't need to do that, Sakura-chan." He's apologetic, Sakura can tell from the mild tone of his voice.

Sakura doesn't let him hold her hand like she was twelve. She's fifteen and by all standards, a grown woman standing on equal footing as him. She pulls away, not with any urgency but with enough strength that she nearly draws him to his feet.

"I'm afraid you'll need a need a new mask. You're free to go." Sakura peels off her gloves and drops it in the waste basket on her way out.

"I'm sorry." He says suddenly making her stop just outside the room. Her fingers tighten on the door frame.

Kakashi catches a glimpse of hard, hard green eyes when she turns her head to acknowledge his apology before it disappears under a mask of professionalism she learns from the Godaime.

"For what? You made me everything I was until I was thirteen." Her smile is thin and it feels like razor blades sliding across her cheeks.

Kakashi realizes everything she was before thirteen is catalogued under her list of failures. It's not a good feeling when he makes the connection of what she's saying.

A nurse stops in front of her and bows. Sakura hands his chart over to her, "Please prescribe a week's worth of Ibuprofen 800 for Hatake-san." Her eyes shift from the nurse to Kakashi and all he sees is a doctor. There is no Genin Sakura in there and not an ounce of remorse as she says, "It seems he's hurting from a wound he caused himself."

Sakura walks out without so much of a goodbye.

Kakashi knows a jab when he feels one and this isn't a jab. It's a full blown punch in the gut.

* * *

**A/N:** Dude, Kakashi owes Sakura. I don't care what you say.


End file.
